200) Think about the appropriate time to make a decision in light of the marginal gains made by acquiring additional information versus the marginal costs of postponing the decision. There are some decisions that are best made after acquiring more information, and some that are best made sooner rather than later. The later a decision is made, the more informed it can be; however, making it later can also have adverse consequences (e.g., postponing progress). Understanding the trade-off between the marginal gains of acquiring the extra information against the marginal costs of postponing a decision is an important factor in the timing and preparation of decision-making.

Brilliantly put. Don't postpone a decision unless you stand to make it better by an amount larger than the cost of the delay.

"Principles" is highly recommended if you haven't gotten around to grabbing a copy yet.

Read Next

I just posted a new article at Less Wrong - "Steps to Achievement: The Pitfalls, Costs, Requirements, and Timelines." This is a little bit longer and more dry than I write for my blog, but I think there's some very important things in here.

If you're interested in goals and achievement, there's quite a lot of meat here. I'm putting the full version up here and please feel very welcome to comment here on this topic, but also consider heading over to Less Wrong, grab a free account, and start participating there. As I described in "You Should Probably Study Rationality," it's a wonderful community.

Reply to: Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic

In "Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic," Anna Salamon outlined some ways that people could take action to be more successful and achieve goals, but do not:

Sometimes, eventually, a decision must be made - Fr. Anthony Odiong, one of the wisest people I've ever met

I've heard this from several people now, and it makes sense: Tough decisions don't matter, since the reason why they're tough is presumably because the risk/reward for all of the options is nearly equal and thus neither is clearly better. But since they're nearly equal, why not just pick one?

Obviously this isn't prudent in every case, but spending a lot of time deliberating certainly can't be the best option.

On the other hand, due to circumstances, sometimes it does pay to take more time for reasons having nothing to do with the decision itself. I'll use an example: social networks. While obviously there are many reasons why Facebook took off whereas Myspace et all didn't, being first certainly didn't help Myspace. In fact, I remember most of my friends switching to Facebook because it was "a better social network than Myspace".

Think about that. If Myspace and Xanga hadn't been around, the concept of 'social network' wouldn't have existed. Then there would be nothing to compare it to. Now if Facebook had come around a couple years later, there might've been an entirely different giant in that niche. They launched at an optimal time.